Lame to be poor eh? I agree if you have the money you better damn well and pay if you're going to get it. But I also recognize all the people who work the low-pay jobs so the rest of us can have a nicer day don't really get paid enough to really eat good along buy over priced media. I've heard the argument "If they can't afford it they shouldn't have it." but that's not a very good view for a country that prides itself on having a high quality of life for all its citizens.
You work minimum wage: $7.25 $290 a week some were around $1,160m/o
$1,160
-15% tax
-$500mo for rent (1bed room apartment)
-$100 for utilities and Internet
-$100 for car insurance
-$60 gas
=$226 for food, essentials and entertainment.

I don't know about the rest of you but I have a decent diet, cook all my own food, and don't eat hardly any junk food and my food bill comes out to around $3.50 a meal 3xA day = $315 that's not counting toilet paper , hygiene, cleaning supplies...etc at the end of the month you pretty much have a roof over your head and 2 meals a day.
Even if you have 2people in a 1br:
$2,320
-15%
-$500 for rent
-$120 for utilities and Internet
-$200 for insurance
-$120 in gas
-$300(600) each for a barley acceptable diet.
-$100 for everything else toilet paper, soap, tooth paste....etc
= $ 332 / 2 = $166 each
Not bad right? $166 each as long as you don't have any debt from medical, for the fact you can't afford to have insurance, your gas bill is really $60/mo I know a lot of people that have to drive 1:30hr to work each day to work it cost them closer to $150/mo, or $80+ for a cell phone, or car maintenance can set you back a couple hundred in fluids and filters every few months. $100 for car insurance is going pretty low to most people I know pay $125~200. In the winter any place your getting a apartment for $500 you'll likely need to add +30% for heating.

I challenge everybody who reads this to apply that money to your eating habits and what you consider a quality of life fit for the working class that are the reason you have all cool services you have here.

Prices are apx-based on living in central America in farm and industrial cities.

I believe Jay Leno once said, and I paraphrase "Why don't you never see PSYCHIC WINS LOTTERY as a newspaper headline?"

Personally, I have never seen the headline "Major software company closes due to rampant downloading"

Software companies are hypocrites. They whine and cry about illegal downloading yet they pad the numbers to gain our sympathy? People like TomSEA keep spouting off that stealing is stealing no matter what the reason. Guess what..so is lying. Software companies and business' in general do it on a daily basis. If a company can make a billion dollars without stealing, lying and taking advantage of its customers then god bless them they deserve every penny they earned. Turn-about is fair play.

That link on the Radiohead sales is inaccurate. Here's what really happened: "Citing a source close to the band, Gigwise.com reported that by the day of its online release, the album had sold 1.2 million copies. The claim, however, has been dismissed by band manager Bryce Edge as "exaggerated". According to an Internet survey conducted by Record of the Day, about one-third of people who downloaded the album paid nothing, with the average price paid being £4."

Bottom line, tens of thousands of people walked away with that music for free, or "donated" considerably less than what normal retail pricing would be.

You people should take a step back and look at how you're trying to explain away your theft. "I can't afford it," and the "companies are lying." Seriously those are the most lame and weakest of excuses. Again, you steal because of the ease through Bit Torrents and the anonymity the internet provides.

I have no doubt if the tables were turned and this was YOUR product being stolen by the hundreds of thousands, you'd be screaming bloody murder about it. But because it's some faceless company and your own feeling of personal entitlement, you not only steal at will, but feel obligated to throw up pathetic excuses for it. Really pathetic.

I'm just glad the computer gaming industry has survived this and welcome the steps they're taking to stem the near unbelievable amount of stealing going on.

Tom really get your head out of your as and see that at $8 average is still a lot better money for an artist then the tiny amount they see from each CD sold

money they get from a CD $<1
Money they got from Dls even with all the people that didn't pay $5~7

More people make money off the CD but there a bunch of half wits that are thieves them self's.

1/4 people paid ok well so what you as the person making it made more money.
As an artist I don't care if 4/5 people steel my art as long as people that like it give me enough to get by I'm happy. I'd rather be less famous and make just as much then be more famous make the same and pay for a CEO and his lackeys to live a life style they shouldn't have off my work.

1. It was given away for donations so how can it be stolen?? They probably made new fans and still made money with that stategy or maybe they were tired of the RIAA and record companies stealing 9/10ths of their earnings. Also please post your link as you have asked others to do.

2. Now this was funny. Basically your saying its ok for a software company to do whatever they want but when its done to them in the form of downloading and the such, they are the victim? That is like the italian mafia crying that the russian mafia is stealing from them. Its not just the software industry but all big corporations. You are correct that stealing is wrong but again, so is lying. It doesn't matter if its a big game company or an individual who programs just for fun. Its just as "pathetic" for software companies to tell outright lies just to gain sympathy as it is for people to rationalize downloading illegally.

3. Yes the gaming industry has survived for 30+ years. If illegal downloading was as bad as they and you say, this wouldn't be the case. They aren't complaining because they are all on the verge of bankruptcy, They are complaining because the they want to soak the customer for every penny they can get by way of lying, cheating and stealing. If they cant make that extra 5 cents by selling a product, SUE...and THAT IS WHAT IS PATHETIC.

Ok guys - my last post because your arguments are seriously pathetic. "Gaming industry has survived so we can steal from them." "Donations indicate we haven't stolen." Never said that happened, nor that's what my point was. Just demonstrating from someone else's statement that "if we're allowed to donate, everyone will make a ton of money and we'll all be happy" and that's clearly not what happens in today's steal-happy society. The theft statistics of "World of Goo" and Radiohead documentation, that's not happening. Theft outweighs purchasing by tenfold. If Radiohead had made a ton of money, everyone would be doing it. But we're damn near 3 years down the road since that experiment and NO ONE has done it since including Radiohead.

Let me break this down to the most simple of arguments. Our society supports a capitalism economy. Which means someone makes a product and the customer pays "x" amount of fair value for the product. And for most of society, that works just fine. I walk into a store, buy a gallon of milk, and pay my $2 for it. Or, I shell out my $49 for a computer game for my entertainment. However, for you guys, with the east of Bit Torrents and the anonimity of the internet, that means, "Oh...let me make up the most weak of excuses and I'll steal your product to justify what I'm doing to my homies. Thanks...buh-buy, and I'll be back to steal more later."

I was raised that unless it's a life-and-death condition, thievery isn't tolerated. It's anti-society, it's anti-capitalism and nothing good comes from it other than instant personal gratification for the thief. You people were obviously raised with a "hey - if you can get away with it, then steal away" mentality.

You know, we wouldn't have to have this conversation if you would just stand up like a man and admit that you steal because you can and you won't stop until you can't. I can at least deal with and marginally respect it. But this whole, " I steal because the mean man is doing x, y, z to me," is really asinine.

How about pulling your heads out and at least admit as to who you are and what you're doing. Or just like stealing, is that too much to ask?

You really have been hiding under a rock havn't you?

http://www.songslide.com/
http://magnatune.com/
http://www.aralie.com

There's also this thing called MySpace... where it's common to see bands with free music.

We that support Creative commons or GNU/Open in the software world don't like piracy, infect we likely hate it more than you do. Why!? Because we give everything away! We want to be paid for the quality of our work with the fan-fair and love of our work.
OpenOffice, Linux of all kinds, Free-BSD, KDE, Genome, GIMP, ABIWORD, .netPaint, Blender.....etc
There are also many writers and artiest out there that love there/our art and just want to show it with the world.

Googles not open but they offer 90% of anything used by the public for free and just subject us to a line plane text ads, and there how rich?

I say lets kick the middle men out on their bums and let them flip burgers for a while or find jobs that actually do the community good.

I don't think anyone here is arguing that piracy is justified, but rather that the draconian anti-piracy measures are both ultimately ineffectual and intellectually dishonest - combating piracy isn't the real motive behind them.

How many pieces of software using some form of copy protection have you ever seen that have remained uncracked? Don't bother answering that, there aren't any. DRM doesn't stop the folks who crack software at all, they only see each new type of 'protection' as another challenge to overcome, and everyone inclined to pirate things will always have a ready supply thanks to those crackers.

No, the people being stymied by DRM are the less technically adept HONEST customers who actually pay for things and then get screwed over by draconian DRM. Allow me to explain by way of several analogies.

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking about the software market in terms of retail businesses. Game companies point to MASSIVE piracy figures and bemoan how much money they lose due to piracy, etc. Based on all their caterwauling, the layman might picture a department store where the customers constantly walk away with entire shelves worth of merchandise (oh noes!) - but nothing of the sort has happened. Software isn't a physical product - there might be packaging, manuals, dvds, etc, but really what they are selling is simply DATA. Stealing a television set from Best Buy costs that store the price of the television you just stole. Stealing a pirated copy of Crysis from the interwebs? Oddly enough that costs EA ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, because you haven't taken anything tangible from them for which there is a cost associated.

While I would never attempt to justify piracy, in terms of impact towards the bottom line there is no difference between downloading an illegal copy of Crysis and walking past the game box in the store but deciding not to buy it. Neither one costs or benefits EA, ergo whenever a company trots out figures showing how many millions of dollars in losses piracy costs them in quarter X, they are essentially lying to you, as the piracy figures do not equal 'losses'. Pirated copies of games are simply UNSOLD copies of games - the difference is there is a mechanism that can quantify how many people downloaded pirated copies, while it's anyone's guess how many people thought about buying a game but decided not to, and nobody would take them seriously if they tried to show us figures about losses caused by 'indecision'.

Companies like EA claim that each pirated copy of their game would have been a sale if it hadn't been pirated. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO WAY THIS CAN BE SUPPORTED BY EVIDENCE. Whatever justification a software pirate has for their actions, they are somebody who has decided to STEAL SOFTWARE. That doing so doesn't hurt the company in question anymore than simply 'not buying it' doesn't change the fact that the individual JUSTIFIED TAKING YOUR WORK WITHOUT PAYING. How likely do you really think it is that a thief will start paying for things if only you can find a way to make it impossible for him to steal them? He's a bloody THIEF!!! So of course the notion that the piracy figures can be directly equated with a $ amount of lost revenue is laughable, and all the protections they keep inventing are easily circumvented so it's not like they can actually force those pirates into a scenario where they have no other choice but to pay for things.


So why all the clamor about DRM and how it's desperately needed thanks to 'piracy', if it doesn't actually stop piracy and pirates wouldn't have paid for your stuff even if they couldn't steal it? Simple: It's to get you, the PAYING customer, to pay for things you already own again (and again, and again), and to kill the secondary market where the publisher doesn't see a dime. Piracy is just the straw man they use to justify this to their honest customers. Not convinced? Honest customers are saddled with limited activation, and if they reach their limit of 're-installs' because they upgrade their computer or have to re-format their OS, EA will instruct them to buy another copy of the game. Pirates never have to bother activating the software in the first place, and can install THEIR copies as many times as they like. Used PC games that feature product-key based account activation? Ha ha ha! Of course that's not going to work, or if it does, you will have even less flexibility before the magic 'We're sorry, but you can't use the software you've purchased anymore' point arises.

If you wanted to give a friend your copy of a modern game, along with all the assorted materials it came with, ie 'transferring the license to another party', the odds are it would not work. How on earth can anyone honestly defend that?! If that still doesn't seem reprehensible to you, picture THIS scenario: You have just purchased a dvd, and watch it on several different players in your home, and then take it over to a friend's house to watch there, but instead of playing, this message pops up...

"We're sorry, but you have reached the maximum amount of activations for this disk. Please purchase a new copy for playback on this device."

If you are a rational human being then this would make you justifiably angry, as that's a load of crap, and that's the reason for all the hate directed at the DRM companies keep foisting upon us - at it's core, DRM is a way to lock legitimate users out of the things they purchased. The 'very best' varieties are essentially unobtrusive minor annoyances like disc checks for games that don't actually need to use the dvd for anything, but anymore those aren't even what people are talking about when they say "DRM", as the term when applied to gaming almost always refers to the travesties companies like EA foist upon us. It's important to bear in mind that Electronic Arts thought a system that required online activation to install, would phone home every week and if it didn't re-verify that you hadn't somehow 'stolen' the legitimately purchased title (you already activated!) after 10 day it would simply lock you out of your software entirely... was a GOOD IDEA. The only reason they didn't implement that system was the subsequent massive outcry of negative customer feedback those announcements generated, and it says a lot when the current "we'll only lock you out when you install it X amount of times" approach is a BETTER one.

Thanks to pointless attempts to combat piracy, I have had to 'break into' several games I legitimately purchased because their copy protection mechanisms broke the game, and this was back in the day where copy protection wasn't actively breaking things as an advertised feature. Piracy is an industry problem to be sure, but the notion that you can prevent it using DRM is laughable, and the attempts to do so only end up hurting the paying customers. As much as companies would love it if everyone who wanted to use their products had to buy their own personal copy that would only work for them, they really need to understand that it's a pipedream they shouldn't try to make come true, because implementing that 'vision' means treating your customers like thieves, while the actual thieves laugh at you and steal it anyways.

The fact about pirating games is that it will always happen. Companies only need to make pirating inconvenient to dissuade most of the pirating, at least in North America and Europe.

I think we'll see games come out on DVD's that require no connection for a while. The shift to downloading games will eventually displace (if not replace) DVD's, and piracy protection is a necessary part of downloadable games.

I just hope that companies don't go too far in that direction. If a gamer is travelling with a laptop and has no internet connection, he or she should still be able to play single player games on the laptop. That's one of the advantages of single player games, after all.